We had a little snow on Thursday evening, so yesterday morning I woke to this:

April snow isn’t all that unusual up here at 7,400 feet.

Thursday morning, before the snow came, I took Bubbles down to the vet for a follow-up appointment. I’m not allowed in the building still because we’re nowhere near the end of the pandemic, so a tech wearing gloves and a mask came out to get him, and this time there was no attempts at handshaking so I guess they’re getting better at social distancing.

They took him inside and I read a book while I waited. After forty-five minutes or so, they called me in my car to tell me that his test results were actually much improved. He’ll have kidney disease for the rest of his life and will need to be on a special diet, but chances are good that he’ll be sticking around for quite some time. We talked about his diet, and I mentioned that, for reasons I will just never understand, he only wants to eat the canned advanced kidney care food I buy directly from them. I went through the hassle of ordering a case of THE EXACT SAME FOOD WITH THE EXACT SAME INGREDIENTS AND THE EXACT SAME FLAVOR from the online pet supplier they had recommended two weeks ago, and he simply refused to eat it. His brother, on the other hand, loves that stuff. His brother, however, doesn’t have kidney disease, so I wasn’t sure he should be eating it. The vet told me that it was unusual for a cat to do that, but they had seen the same behavior in one other patient of theirs before. She also assured me that it was okay for Bubbles’ brother to eat the special food I’d gotten so much of. It won’t hurt him, and, considering the fact that they are brothers, he might have potential kidney problems too, so this might be good for him.

Go figure.

So I paid for the visit, plus 11 more cans of food that Bubbles will actually eat, and they brought him and the food back out to me in my car. I drove home, relieved that the cat will live, but also relieved that I don’t have to go back to the vet’s for probably a month. I’m supposed to be staying home as much as I can, but this cat’s medical issues have made that sort of difficult.

Still: he’s going to live. For how long, I’m not sure, but he looks a lot better and is mostly acting like his old badass self, when he’s not snoozing, that is. A little good news for us at last.